The Oscars are Feb 24, and over the next few days there are few “Oscar” films I need to catch you up on before the big event!

See a French film called AMOUR which won this year’s Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and is among this year’s nine Oscar nominees for Best Picture. But if you were expecting a sensual romance of lovers drifting down the Seine, prepare instead to be seduced by a stunning tale of fidelity and sorrow, companionship and courage, and yes–profound love between a long-married couple, and the life and death they travel together. Jean-Louis Trintignant (A MAN AND A WOMAN) and Emmanuelle Riva (HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR) star as an elderly couple –Georges and Anne– living a full and lovely life in Paris– concerts, reading, family and friends. Suddenly Anne suffers a stroke– and their lives shift into the final phase.

Austrian Director Michael Haneke gives us an unsparing, unsentimental, yet poignantly delicate meditation on the deterioration of the body and mind of a human being– somebody’s beloved.  These two actors trailing their cinematic history as young, vital players are particularly touching here; to see them older, physically changed, resonates– taking us to the place where art and life meet. Emmanuelle Riva  who at the age of 85 has just become the oldest actor ever to be nominated for an Oscar SHOULD win BEST ACTRESS for the deeply affecting work she does here.

Haneke–with the exception of one brief scene at the beginning of the film– retreats with his camera to their apartment, where their lives are now centered. There, the routine of their years together is almost tactile, as apparent as the light that comes in every day at the same time, slanting in at the kitchen window when they’re eating breakfast, until one morning she does not react. Haneke meticulously leads us through their day to day routines and relationships, altered as Anne’s condition declines: their meals, their errands, their conversations and their silences, the heartbreaking visits from the neighbors, the “caregivers”– some quite cruel, their daughter– unintentionally cruel. Isabelle Huppert has the thankless task of capturing the anger and frustration of an only child trying to help, to take charge, to do something– when there is nothing to be done.  There is a heartbreaking visit from one of Anne’s former students- a pianist who flourished under her tutelage, and the reverie it inspires as Georges thinks back to a time when his wife would fill their book-lined study with her playing– and the inability of all that beauty to change anything.

I watched in wonder at the dignity this couple wraps around each other, at his unfailing devotion as he stays with her, ministers to her, attuned to her wavering consciousness as she slowly breaks down.  Emmanuelle Riva’s detailed expression of Anne’s graceful stoicism during her mental, physical and spiritual erosion, is nothing short of astonishing. She is an actress of uncommon magnetism and subtlety, a prism of clarity as the inevitable descends.

For all that– the ending is a shock and a puzzle, as it is for everyone on this earth; though we think we are ready, we are not. Haneke has captured all of this and more. Do not miss AMOUR.